WHEN THE GAME IS OVER

So this is probably the hardest part of the game (and book). What do you do when it ends? Every season ends, and eventually every career ends. Your career will end someday, and you will begin another chapter in your life. This is a good thing. Every practice, game, and season, you are learning things about your sport, yourself, and life.

This is part of the beauty of it all. Life is also a game, and you’ll have a next chapter after your participation in sports—whether it ends at age 16 or 36. Many of the skills from sports (but not all, as this gets overhyped in our culture) will carry with you in life: teamwork, work ethic, leadership, persistence, performing in front of others under pressure, dealing with pressure, among other things. This is something good to think about as your season and career come to a close. Also, as you move forward, you will discover that not everyone you work or live with is an athlete. This will be important to understand as many work colleagues will see things differently than you as they will have a variety of backgrounds and experiences (unless you stay in athletics, of course). Bear in mind that you had and have a high level of internal motivation to perform and practice at the level you did, and for a long period of time.

The next big question after your season or sports career ends is What else am I motivated to do? What else do I love doing and can see myself doing every day? Find a field that you can give the same amount of focus as you did athletics. Keep thinking ahead about where you want to be in five and ten years. Just as you set goals before your season, as your career ends you will reorient and set new goals. Remember, nature abhors a vacuum. What this means is that you will either have positive or negative activities in your life. Athletics are inherently positive as they are goal-oriented and structured. This is not to say that you don’t have negative experiences or come across difficult people in sports, but for the most part it is positive. When this huge activity and structure are removed from your life, they need to be replaced with another positive activity and structure. That is why so many athletes get depressed—they simply wake up after their career with no structure, no routine, no social outlets or teammates around, and then simply say, “What am I doing?” Be careful about this happening to you, and don’t psychologically avoid the inevitable. Anticipate your career ending and do something about it. There will always be another chapter. Whether you are playing sports or not, hopefully you will continue to exercise and stay healthy the same way you have for so many years.